I wanted to talk about something a little lighter today so...the death penalty! Now I am not gonna talk about how it costs 10-20 times as much to execute than to incarcerate for life, or how the ways we kill inmates are sometimes ineffective and even tortuous, or how the death penalty does not reduce crime, or even how race plays a factor. While all of those points are fucked up and deserve their own time I am gonna talk about two very simple ideas that I believe are the biggest problems with the death penalty.
Our justice system isn't perfect. That is a link to the innocence project, a group of people who help people wrongly accused on death row get a fairer trial. 62% of people wrongly sentenced to die are convicted by false testimony, either by being coerced into giving false testimony by offering the people rewards (shorter sentences) or by them wanting to save their own skin. The introduction of DNA evidence has also freed 250 people from death row. 250! I think it is safe to say that some innocent people died at the hands of our justice system. If even one person who is innocent is killed in this system it makes murderers out of us all. Until we get to the point where there is a way of finding irrefutable evidence of guilt, which is a long ways off, we shouldn't even consider this form of punishment.
I am going to get in some trouble for this second point, but I think it needs to get made. If you are the family/friend of a victim, I am sorry. I can hardly imagine what it must be like. I can understand the want for revenge at the loss of a loved one. I think anyone can really, but if you feel that someone needs to die for their actions, don't pawn that off on someone else. If you truly believe with all your heart that someone needs to die to make up for something that they have done, don't make other people pull that trigger for you. Do it yourself. Remember though, there are consequences for taking that action, and you will need to pay for it. If you want to allay your fears of repercussions for that action, then you must not want revenge all that badly, because you would do it yourself. Revenge is, at its core, an intrinsically personal subject. By putting the responsibility on society as a whole to take your revenge for you, you make others pay for something that ought to be your responsibility, and that is fucked up. And, to call back to my earlier point, what if the person you help convict and put to death turns out to be innocent?
In the interest of, at the very least, something like balance I will say I have no idea how I would react to family being killed. I am sure that I would be emotionally wrecked though, and thus unable to make a reasoned decision. But revenge is not a rational choice, it is an emotional one, so no one can know how they would react in that situation until they are put into a position that forces that response. I am not trying to say that revenge killing is right (there is a reason that eye for an eye type justice hasn't been a real thing for a long time), I just want to point out that the accountability for your own emotional reaction should be on you, not on society as a whole.
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